"J'accuse!"

Not really tracking online reading these days, but I thought it was worth linking to this illuminating NYRB piece about Edouard Louis written by Jason Farago. I must read the novel, but it will probably be worth my while to read the original - the points about structure and style make it sound riveting. Anyway, interesting to students of literature and politics alike...

The drift from fiction

Geoff Dyer and others on the blurriness of the line between fact and fiction.

Little a

Meet Ed Park!

Mouth objects

Lost languages of the dead.

Red light, green light

Just read what is probably my favorite novel of the year.  It is incredibly good, and not yet published in the US unfortunately (it is going to be hard for me to put it evangelically into people's hands): Alan Warner's The Deadman's Pedal.  Aside from the fact that it includes all sorts of elements I particularly like, the prose is unbeatably perfect, and with a very different set of political and cultural alignments than Alan Hollinghurst, whose books I love but who is coming at things from a point of view that is frequently off-putting to me. 

In a curious way I was much reminded of Alan Garner, whose name is only different by one letter, the Garner of Red Shift rather than Weirdstone.  Geology, place, history, above all language and the particular vocabularies associated with various forms of expert knowledge; I can't think of another book whose idiom quite so precisely and magically as this one captures a whole world with all of its dimensions.  Stuart Kelly's review at the Guardian fortunately saves me the trouble of trying to write a better description here!

Not sure if the feel will translate in a short excerpt, but here are a few sentences I especially liked (they are unusual in the context of the novel as a whole, there is almost an aphoristic quality to the final sentence - not Warner's usual habit - which is why it stood out, though it is quite distinct from the Flaubert-Hollinghurst-St. Aubyn lineage of satirical summing-up):

The bike struggled with their combined weights on the hairpin corner at the top of the King's Way and he had to turn the handlebar gear down to second with the bright headlight of an impatient car behind them before he indicated left and pulled in.

This lay-by, so insignificant in their previous lives, had now become their place of meeting.  The need was less furtive and romantic than that the engine on the new bike struggled to take them both up the longer and steeper hill within the Brae Estate -- as Simon had discovered on his birthday.  Almost all Simon's comments on any future Nikki and he would share involved reference to a more powerful, anticipated motorbike.

Tokens

Not open to the public, but in the slightly unlikely event that you happen to be reading this and are also in the class, come up and introduce yourself after the lecture: I'm speaking tomorrow to Siddhartha Deb's fiction students at the New School on Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year.  It really is the most extraordinary book (I started rereading it an hour or two ago - I have an old lecture that can probably be 50% recycled but I thought I had better read as much as I could and think about what the appropriate frame will be for this context).

Air chrysalis

Dennis Lim's Bookforum piece on Haruki Murakami gives a good sense of why 1Q84 was my favorite novel of 2011....

Subcontinental, uncomplimentary

This Wikipedia entry for English words with uncommon properties will repay further attention at some more leisurely moment. (Prompted by Brent's sending me this link!)

The catalog of things that must get done in the next week and a half is busting my brain! However it is all good, I am very happy to be back in my teaching life and with all sorts of other appealing obligations of a more or less optional kind; only I had better activate my superpowers, I think...

(Among other things I am reading lots of novels as a member of the judging committee for a fiction prize and tantalizingly can't really say anything about them, good or otherwise, until the awards have been given and the prize is over and done with, at which point I don't see why I can't say some good things about the ones I have particularly enjoyed...)

I did read a good book last night that it will not contravene the embargo to mention: Jessie Sholl's Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding. The content is excellent, and I am sure it will find a very wide audience; I did feel that it could have been an essay-length piece of absolute long-lived brilliance, and that something was sacrificed in the writing in order to make it a book-length piece, but it is still a very good book. Two paragraphs I particularly liked:

In June, I'm walking along the Hudson River as I sometimes do, when I notice that my iPod is sounding utterly fantastic. Because of the times I helped my dad test out his new audio gear, I can easily tell the difference between a crap stereo and a good one. And suddenly my iPod sounds as good as one of my dad's best systems.

I take out my earbuds. Did I buy new ones and not remember? They look the same. Besides, I would remember. And my iPod certainly hasn't changed. I put the earbuds back in and switch from the Lemonheads to Outkast. Again, the music sounds excellent. I try Radiohead, the Rolling Stones, PJ Harvey. I'm hearing individual parts to the songs that I haven't noticed, or at least appreciated, before. And these parts are coming together to create a vastly wider spectrum of sound. I continue walking, blown away by what I'm hearing, still baffled as to why. And then I realize: It's the Wellbutrin. I'd become so depressed that everything had gone flat, including music. Now it's round again.

Bonus link to my favorite PJ Harvey song:

Leftovers

In the modern version of the university library, with on-line renewals a matter of ease rather than the physical inconvenience of lugging a huge bag of books back in to the physical place of the library itself, it is common to think of library books as being in one's possession for a matter of years (five years, to be more precise - at Columbia one is able to renew for up to 10 semesters online before needing to bring the books in in person to "reset" the borrowing period!).

But a spell out of town prompts purging of the home library collection - I am going to keep some library books in my office, but mostly I must get rid of 'em all for now...

Thus the leftover phenomenon - it is like eating things out of the fridge, they may have been very good in the first place but there is a sense of duty in their later consumption.

I became mesmerized the other evening, though, as I reread Richard Altick's The English Common Reader. My Columbia colleague Gerald Cloud mentioned it in a discussion earlier this year, and it reminded me that I wanted to revisit it - I think I last read it (or perhaps "dipped into it" is the apter phrase?) as an undergraduate researching the forms of serial publication adopted and developed by Dickens.

It really is a great read! I couldn't put it down - the point about the strange convergence of utilitarian and evangelical anti-fiction movements in the nineteenth century is extremely well taken - but here are a few bits I particularly enjoyed, the first one just for fun and for the pleasures of regional spelling and the second because it picks up on my previous post.

An opponent of Edinburgh 18th-century lending-library pioneer Allen Ramsay's practices:

"... this profannes is come to a great hight, all the villanous profane and obscene books and playes . . . are gote doun from London by Allen Ramsay, and lent out, for an easy price, to young boyes, servant weemin of the better sort, and gentlemen, and vice and obscenity dreadfully propagated. Ramsay has a booke in his shope wherein all the names of those that borrou his playes and bookes, for two pence a night, or some such rate, are sett doun; and by these, wickedness of all kins are dreadfully propagat among the youth of all sorts."

And here is William Cobbett's description (as given by his nineteenth-century biographer) of seeing a copy of A Tale of a Tub in a bookseller's window at Richmond (for 3d.) and purchasing it and reading it behind a haystack at Kew Gardens:

The book was so different from any thing that I had ever read before: it was something so new to my mind, that, though I could not at all understand some of it, it delighted me beyond description; and it produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect. I read on till it was dark, without any thought about supper or bed. When I could see no longer, I put my little book in my pocket, and tumbled down by the side of the stack, where I slept till the birds in Kew Gardens awaked me in the morning; when I started to Kew, reading my little book.

"I am a teenage elf"

"If someone told me about it now, I would probably think it's incredibly nerdy, but once you go out into the forest and get to hit monsters with a latex sword, there's no going back."

The trouble with gin

Geoff Dyer has a very interesting piece at the Guardian on John Cheever's journals (the whole piece is well worth reading in its entirety):

What he does not say – how could he? – was that the forms in which he gave dramatic expression to this sense could be enlarged manifestations of confinement, that the hard-won craftsmanship that stood him in good stead at the New Yorker worked against his being able to plumb the complex depths of his being. Only in the shapeless privacy of his journal could he do that. If he was "writing narrative prose" Cheever believed that "every line cannot be a cry from the heart". So he stopped crying. In the journals, meanwhile, he wept "gin tears, whiskey tears, tears of plain salt" and stopped worrying about narrative. The irony is that, while he was instinctively hostile to the splurging of "the California poets", his own best writing would derive from a sustained 40-year word-binge with no thought of form or – at least until very near the end – of publication. A further irony follows: the consummate craftsman ended up being reliant on the posthumous intervention of an editor to turn this repetitive mass of bellyaching, "booze-fighting" and self-lament into a book with immense narrative power.

The courtesy minute

Fascinating.

The Unlikelies

I read an amazing novel this weekend - I absolutely loved this book! It is so rare that I find something that really appeals as much to my light-reading side as to my wanting-books-to-be-really-smart side - but this is an absolute page-turner, and also one of the most interesting and stimulating books I've read all year. It is Victor Lavalle's Big Machine, and I found it spectacularly good - funny, scary, surprising, spiritually astute - I couldn't put it down.

(Why haven't I read more great novels about cults? What is there out there? Laurie King's A Darker Place was very good. I still remember, as a child, feeling the shock of the story of the Jonestown massacre - were pictures published in Newsweek, or am I just imagining it?)

Here is a WSJ profile of Lavalle, because I am too lazy to write a proper review myself; and here is Lavalle on his sex life during his years as a very fat man.

On a lazier note, I add that in the bookstore at 30th St. Station in Philadelphia this evening I seized upon Even Money. It lasted me pretty much exactly all the way home to the 116th St. subway stop, so I consider it money well spent; it is slightly more readable than its predecessor, but I think that the collaborative father-son team continues to misunderstand the extent to which the traditional Dick Francis hero steps over the line dividing the legal from the illegal only because there is a gap between the legal and the just, whereas the protagonists of these last couple books have a blithe disregard for the law that makes them considerably overstep the bounds of what the Franciscan reader is likely to find acceptable!

[ED. A quick search post-blogging leads me to the Largehearted Boy Lavalle playlist, with links - in fact it must be that Ed Park's Astral Weeks coverage is what led me to buy the book in the first place!]

Bonsai relationships

At the Millions, Anne K. Yoder interviews Phillip Lopate about his new book Notes on Sontag (the first volume in Princeton University Press's new Writers on Writers series).

(Hmmm, I think I am not prominent enough to do one of these, and also that I have too many projects in the pipeline already - but I want to write one on Anthony Burgess!)

Two by two

Clearly I packed for this trip in considerable haste - the reader who takes a very close look at this picture will see that I accidentally brought two different library copies of Hazleton Spencer's altogether delightful book Shakespeare Improved: The Restoration Versions in Quarto and On the Stage, one being the first edition of 1927 and the other a 1963 reissue!

All sorts of good things in this one, but I hit a long quotation from Steele's Tatler fairly early on that I thought worth quoting again here for the light it casts on an issue in which I've become increasingly interested.

It is not so much what critics tend to talk about, but teaching Restoration and eighteenth-century drama and fiction has left me increasingly convinced that the language developed collaboratively by writers of fictional narrative for notating the interactions of characters (their behavior, their body language, their presumptive inner lives) is drawn first and foremost from a set of conventions prompted much more specifically by the desire (among spectators of a critical bent) to talk about the behavior of actors in plays, with some blurring of bounds between actor and role.

Look at what Steele's doing - it is quoted extensively by Spencer, but I have taken the text from this edition (Tatler No. 167, 2 May 1710) - in this passage on the death of the great actor Betterton:

I have hardly a notion, that any performer of antiquity could surpass the action of Mr. Betterton in any of the occasions in which he has appeared on our stage. The wonderful agony which he appeared in, when he examined the circumstance of the handkerchief in Othello; the mixture of love that intruded upon his mind, upon the innocent answers Desdemona makes, betrayed in his gesture such a variety and vicissitude of passions, as would admonish a man to be afraid of his own heart; and perfectly convince him, that it is to stab it, to admit that worst of daggers, jealousy. Whoever reads in his closet this admirable scene, will find that he cannot, except he has as warm an imagination as Shakespeare himself, find any but dry, incoherent, and broken sentences: but a reader that has seen Betterton act it, observes, there could not be a word added; that longer speeches had been unnatural, nay, impossible, in Othello's circumstances. The charming passage in the same tragedy, where he tells the manner of winning the affection of his mistress, was urged with so moving and graceful an energy, that, while I walked in the cloisters, I thought of him with the same concern as if I waited for the remains of a person who had in real life done all that I had seen him represent.

The system of notation that Steele is helping to create here (and that Aphra Behn was also one to pioneer, as one of the most frequent crossers-over between stage drama and prose fiction) is then borrowed by writers of prose fiction who wish to test the limits of what can be done in a third-person voice by way of chronicling the actions and experiences of human beings.

I find myself in a place of familiar frustration at this point in the summer. I'm now really ready to get down to work writing - but it's about to be time to start teaching again!

I have a semester of sabbatical coming up in the spring, and I am planning on making good use of it.

I have a couple longstanding projects that still need finishing up in the immediate future: I am just now writing a piece on Shakespeare adaptation for a forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century that must be finished over the next couple weeks, and I will be working very hard in September on one more pass through the sequel to The Explosionist, now titled Invisible Things. (It will go to the copy-editor at the end of September, after which point my own intervention will be reduced to tinkering and obsessive checking/proof-reading, so this is my last chance to get stuff right.)

I have made commitments to contribute a couple article-length pieces to two books; one is the eighteenth-century volume of the Oxford History of the English novel (a chapter on Restoration drama's influence on eighteenth-century fiction, which is very closely related to these things I've been thinking about); the other, a Cambridge Companion to the Epistolary Novel (my essay on a topic as yet to be specified). These probably won't be due for another year or so.

In the meantime the dust has settled and I can now see my way clearly through to my next pair of book projects. I have regretfully shelved for now the hugely ambitious techniques-of-the-body book - I think it is a multi-year project that will take considerable further reading before I would be ready to start writing it.

But I have two easy books that are on my mind as what I'd most like to write next.

The first one, for which I have already (illicitly, last week, when I should have been working on Shakespeare!) laid down some words, is a memoir about my love affair with triathlon.

The second, which relates quite closely to things I've been teaching for many years and now rather have the urge to put into a little book, is going to be an modest volume called A Bread-and-Butter Theory of the Novel. Somewhere near the beginning will be a paragraph on usage, and this may not be the title the book ends up with - but I do like the contrast between the mouthwatering pragmatism of "bread and butter" (one of my favorite foods) and "theory of the novel"!

(A notional previous incarnation of this book was going to be called Austen for Beginners, but it is really an introduction to narratology and the eighteenth-century novel - it has expanded outwards...)

Both of these book projects have enough of an exploratory component to keep me interested and yet are in some sense also appealing as a way of recording and consolidating some of what I've been thinking and talking about in recent years - I am hoping it might be this time next year and I will have full drafts of both of them, but that may be overoptimistic. Books always take twice as long to write as you expect...

(Bonus link: Charlie Jane Anders on the five Shakespeare heroes that science fiction epics could learn from.)

"I'm a detective, a treasure hunter"

I think I linked to this when it was first published, but I have just read Stephen Elliott's "Why I Write" for the second time and commend it to your attention. The Adderall Diaries will be released on September 1.

Pawprints

The shock of the past jabs Hilary Mantel in the ribs.